Mulling the U. S. robot revolution com
ing in reply-and the jobs that will inevita
bly disappear-MIT automation researcher
Harley Shaiken cautions that robots and the
chip differ in a major way from previous
waves of mechanization.
"This technology affects offices as well as
factories," he told me. "It creates a potential
economic vise: One jaw shoves people from
the plant, and the other limits their shift to
white-collar jobs." Shaiken concludes that
without retraining programs and new jobs,
we invite severe economic dislocations.
"We're creating jobs in the long run," re
sponds Stanley Polcyn, president of the Ro
bot Institute of America and senior vice
president of Unimation, Inc., a major pro
ducer of robots. This nation has only about
6,000 now, he notes, adding that to meet de
mand for more, the robotics industry itself
will hire great numbers of workers.
Then there are the new job markets ro
bots will open, like deep-sea mining. Or re
pair of home robots. In five years, predicts
Polcyn, the first modestly useful but very ex
pensive ones should be housebroken.
ANOTHER FIXTURE of futuristic
forecasts-the electronic newspa
per-is already here. More than a
dozen dailies now publish an edi
tion without cutting a tree or inking a press.
"You can't give a kid separate editions for
the lawyers, laborers, and housewives on his
paper route," points out Elizabeth Loker,
who helped develop an electronic edition of
the Washington Post. It goes out over tele
phone lines to personal computers, and sub
scribers choose what they'll read from a
menu on their screens, instead of hefting an
entire paper off the front step. "Electronic
delivery lets every reader assemble his own
newspaper," says Loker.
Reading news on a computer screen for an
hourly fee can tax the eyes and the wallet
an electronic version of a 25-cent paper
Uncomplaining workers, robots at a
Chryslerplantin Newark, Delaware,cost
$100,000 each.A single robot can perform a
dozen or more different spot-welds with
greaterprecisionthan a human. But many of
the nation's 24 million industrialworkers
are wary of increasingautomation.
could easily cost ten dollars. But publishers
believe that shoppers will pay for up-to-the
minute advertising, a money-maker that
also attracts the American Telephone and
Telegraph Company. A possible future rival
of newspapers, AT&T has already tested an
electronic edition of the Yellow Pages.
At Bell Labs, the research arm of AT&T,
I learned a primary cause of such changes.
"Each time microelectronics cuts comput
ing costs by a factor of ten," explained Dr.
John S. Mayo, executive vice president for
network systems, "it opens a vast array of
things that were once uneconomic."
Like the teleterminal Dr. Mayo showed
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